Most previous studies of morphological dis-
ambiguation and dependency parsing have
been pursued independently. Morphological
taggers operate on n-grams and do not take
into account syntactic relations; parsers use
the “pipeline” approach, assuming that mor-
phological information has been separately
obtained.
However, in morphologically-rich languages,
there is often considerable interaction between
morphology and syntax, such that neither can
be disambiguated without the other. In this pa-
per, we propose a discriminative model that
jointly infers morphological properties and
syntactic structures. In evaluations on various
highly-inflected languages, this joint model
outperforms both a baseline tagger in morpho-
logical disambiguation, and a pipeline parser
in head selection.